THE THREE KINGDOMS.

A GREAT many years ago Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff
expressed a strong wish, for the good of the
nation, that clever politicians having nothing particular
to do could be induced to take pleasure in feeding
ducks. "I look upon an able statesman out of
business," he remarked, "like a huge whale that
will endeavour to overturn the ship unless he has
an empty cask to play with."

Having no better diversion to occupy him, Lord
Palmerston has overturned the ship. It was quite
unexpected. Indeed, nothing that is expected is to be
looked for now a-days. At the very moment when the
ministerial evening journal was complacently stating
it as a "fair ground of congratulation," that on the
momentous question of national defences no greater
difference existed between public men possessed of
official responsibility or official experience, "than the
difference between Lord John Russell and Lord
Palmerston as to calling out the local or regular
Militia," this very difference was exploding in the
House of Commons, blowing up Lord John, putting
Lord Derby in his place, and making Mr. Disraeli
right honourable and her Majesty's Chancellor of the
Exchequer.

In what " the difference" really consisted that led
to this remarkable result is not the least surprising part
of the affair. Some few weeks ago Lord John Russell
turned out Lord Palmerston for his too friendly
disposition to M. Bonaparte, and it is Lord Palmerston
who now turns out Lord John Russell for his want of
vigour in arming against M. Bonaparte. It is one
of those transactions where nobody knows what
anybody means, and in which, when "explanation" once
begins, all hope of ever knowing anything is utterly
extinguished. The only thing placed beyond any
matter of doubt is, that a protection ministry is again
in office; and that to what Mr. Disraeli calls "the
men of metal and large-acred squires, the Pakingtons,
Mileses, and Henleys, the stout heart of Mr. Buck, and
the pleasant presence of Walter Long, "the government
of England is confided for the present.

Our Narrative will duly inform the curious inquirer
to what an extraordinary jumble of business in arrear
these men of stout metal, and comely presence, will
be asked to address themselves with as little delay
as may be. Never did so many things hang on hand
which people's minds are more or less made up to
get settled and put out of hand. It is clear that we
must have proper and efficient Defences. Every one
feels an instinct of alarm on this point, more unerring
than the clearest demonstrations by which reason
might attempt to prove it. It is not less clear that
we must be rid of our Chancery Abuses. The Queen
denounced them in her speech, and her subjects
are literally dying of them. It may be less clear,
but is hardly less desirable, that we should have
our Parliament Reformed. Its abuses and dilapidations
are confessed by all parties, and what Lord John
was doing to cobble them up has at least served to
make it quite manifest that they cannot much longer
be left as they are. Then there is the Income Tax,
all unsettled, which the new Chancellor of the
Exchequer so particularly objects to in its present form.
Also there is Education; everybody crying out we
must have it, nobody agreeing in what way. Also
there is Sanitary Reform, about which what is done
bears such infinitely inverse ratio to what has been
talked about, that our very sewers continue still
undrained, and our most crowded streets in polluting
contact with the dead. Nor may the list be even
closed (though our present enumeration may) with
what remains of troublesome arrears in the war with
the Caffres, the constitutions of New Zealand and the
Cape, and the convict disputes in Australia and
Sydney. Without naming even the name of that
most unquiet portion of her Majesty's dominions
which has been the stumbling-block of every
administration for the last half-century, and is not in
the least likely to be less obstructive now, it is
sufficiently manifest that her Majesty's new advisers
have not succeeded to the quiet repose of a sinecure,
and that it is amid marked signs and portents of
perplexity and change their predecessors have passed
away.

Years after the present generation shall have
passed away too, it is possible that these pages of ours
may be sought by some antiquary, curious to learn in
what state of the world it was that the last rump of
veritable old Whiggery disappeared from the public
scene, never again, in all human probability, to revisit
it in that unadulterated form. He will then learn
that the whole world appeared to be agitated just at
that moment as with the throes of far more wonderful
births than those of a new British Colonial Minister
in a respectable chairman of Quarter Sessions, and a
new British Chancellor of the Exchequer in a clever
writer of romance.

That was the very month, Mr. Dryasdust will ascertain,
when, with no perceptible effect upon the business
or enjoyments of the people, the sudden overflow of a
huge reservoir swept away in one night the entire capital
and enterprise of a flourishing manufacturing settlement
in a Yorkshire valley. The better part of a
million of money was lost, and more than a hundred
lives; and there was an inquiry, and no one was
found greatly to blame, and the mills were again
built, and the reservoir again filled from the streams
of the valley, and all was expected to go on as before.
In that month too came news from the coast of
Africa, that, at a sacrifice of near a hundred lives and
an incalculable sum of money, the clever ex-minister
who upset his colleagues because they had turned him
out of Downing-street for snubbing and exasperating
all the Foreign Powers, had managed, by way of
counterpoise to those old allies he had affronted, to
raise up a new ally for the English people in the
person of one of the prodigious African princes who
live in reed huts on pestilential swamps, and